29/03: The Real Trouble for the Democrats in 2008

The talk of an impending implosion for the Blue Team continues to rage.

In a nutshell: the conventional wisdom of the moment confidently asserts that a rancorous primary equals a big loss in November.

This storyline is mostly driven by partisans for the candidate slightly ahead right now, who see advantage in prematurely calling the contest on account of damp underpants, and a press corps that lacks a sense of history or the ability to take the long view--but loves to push the panic button and breathlessly report on an onrushing cataclysm.

An aside: none of us are very good at predicting the future--but no cohort in America is any less prescient than the jittery chattering class of mainstream media impalas, nervously sniffing the wind, kibitzing with one another as they pass the time between dashing off to the next stampede.

There is a crisis looming for the Democrats--but it is a brand of trouble that they all seem completely blind to at the moment. The Democratic Party is not positioning itself very wisely for a general election.

First, the good news for Democrats.

No matter what happens between now and August, this remains a Democratic year.

The eventual Democratic candidate of 2008 will run buoyed by intense George W. Bush fatigue. The electorate is restless with an unpopular five-year war with no end in sight, and the uncertainty concerning the economy always plays in favor of the out-party.

The eventual Democratic candidate of 2008 will run against a presumptive Republican nominee who is seventy-one-years-old, who is admittedly inexpert on the economic questions, and who stubbornly (albeit bravely) advocates extending the five-year war indefinitely.

Bottom Line. Incontrovertible Fact. This is a good year to run as a Democrat.

However, for the first time in a long time, I am starting to believe that John McCain has a slim chance to prevail in November.

But not for all the conventional hand-wringing reasons we keep hearing presently.
Why might McCain actually have a chance?

The unique and thoroughly unpredictable Obama Phenomenon has pushed the Democratic party well to the left of traditional viability.

Obama is the most unapologetically liberal candidate to seriously contend for the Democratic nomination since George McGovern.

Obama is unabashedly against the war in Iraq. He is no less adamant on this point than Dennis Kucinich.

Anti-war candidates do not get elected president of the United States. Never. Not once.

Mrs. Clinton certainly understood this, which is why she began her campaign for the nomination as a centrist Democrat, strong on defense, tough as nails on terrorism, and committed to success in Iraq.

But then came unforeseen calamities between the Tigris and the Euprhates--and then came Obama. When she voted for the war back in 2002, she bet on a more competent Bush administration and a few more of the intangibles breaking our way--but Iraq surprised everyone. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton is the only person in America who had more to lose from a mishandled Iraq than George Bush.

A festering Iraq opened up the door for O--and he did the rest with his charisma, oratory, message of reconciliation, and implicit offer of racial redemption.

But the Obama Juggernaut comes with a price. Not only is Obama anti-war, he is for higher taxes, national health insurance, more social programs, a radically liberal view of America and its place in the world, and a whole host of things to which most Americans are completely unsympathetic.

These are views that Republicans take great pains to project on a Democratic candidate (oftentimes needing to exaggerate for political purposes). There will be no distortion necessary in the case of Obama. He is the genuine article.

If Obama wins the nomination, Democrats will need to hold their breath for three months, hoping that the "spell" does not wear off before the first Tuesday in November. For, stripped of the magic, Obama's views on public policy and political philosophy are not the stuff of successful general election campaigns.

And, even if Mrs. Clinton "steals" the nomination between now and August, she has tarried too long in the left-wing morass: parroting his anti-Iraq rhetoric, bad-mouthing free trade, and promising billions to every American in need. She had no choice: she had to either move left or get crushed--nevertheless, there she is, spinning her wheels in the soft turf of liberal disconnect.

Mrs. Clinton has enough political acumen to start steering back toward the center line ASAP--but is it too late? Will she be able to gain traction? Has she gone too far? Specifically, would she lose all credibility, if she suddenly started speaking sanely on Iraq again for a general election audience?

Of course, let me repeat, this is such a dismal year for the GOP--none of that may matter. But it gives McCain some hope.

Comments

Like you say, we all suck at predicting the future. The race is McCains to lose - in the sense that if he can penetrate Obama's messiahhood with barbed attack (and oh what ammunition he has, as you pointed out) he can and will win the election. If not, it will be eloquent luminary versus confused old fool in the debates, and on election day. So far Obama has played poorly on defense, but McCain has played poorly on offense. Whomever corrects themselves first wins.

The problem we have in predicting this future is the modern liberal movement itself which has metastasized into a religion of its own. Unfortunately, this secular religion oxymoron is a worldwide phenomenon which pretends that there is no history, no precedent, and pretends that every person on this planet is a saint just waiting to be allowed to be a saint, and could be, if only the American Republican devils weren't tempting them to be otherwise. Barack Obama has become a prophet for that religion. That is a dynamic that may be tough to beat.

I see this "secular religion" as a response to the fact that the world is indeed changing in fundamental ways. The strengths of governments everywhere are collapsing in the face of technology-enabled globalization (I use "globalization" as a moniker for many, many issues at hand). The concept of money itself is under question. Abilities that were once the sole purview of governments, like space travel and mass destruction, are now in the hands of corporations and individuals. Technology is even creating the possibility that, one day, we just might be even be able to transcend our very humanity. It is an empowering time for people around the world. What hasn't been determined yet is the shape of new societies that can best survive these changes.

I see the modern liberal movement as a very modernist response, but a mostly reactionary and even random response. The conspiracy theories that embody today's liberal thought, in my opinion, are likely symptoms of confusion that result from suddenly finding oneself in an empowered position with no direction. Imagine being a child, given a loaded gun, and never having been educated on what to do with said empowering weapon. Regardless of how "global" we are, humans are still humans and we are (at this moment, anyway) still built like humans in our heads. We still desire tribal identity even in the face of processes which threaten to dilute any such identity. As various humans come in to their own, they want to exercise and flex their new "muscles" at the same time finding ways of differentiating themselves from the other "thems." In an obviously changing world, it is natural for people of the New World to differentiate themselves from people of The Old. This is the same "Modern" versus "Old" argument that every adolescent grows through, but enacted today by armies of grown adults all over the world. In the end, the modern liberal movement is a movement about identity. Sanity, logic and responsibility to past agreements be damned, this emergent movement is about creating New Man.

How the Hell do you beat that? Obama has the new religion on his side. McCain, by his very existence, embodies what it is not. Followers of this new religion will see in McCain everything they want to loathe about the Old World, just like they have done with Bush. If they don't find The Other in this man, they will invent it. In the end, nothing he will say and nothing he has ever done will matter to those looking to create New Man. How the Hell do you beat that?

My response would be, you don't have to beat it. It will, by its very nature beat itself. My gut feeling is that as the Democratic Primaries continue, they are turning off more and more of their own party as well as independents. All of this hyperpartisan blather continually neglects that the vast majority of America agree on the vast majority of issues. Case in point, we don't like higher taxes because we think the government wastes the money, We're generally a spiratual people who want the government our of our beliefs, We hate losing and we pissed off that we got into another war that we seemed intent on losing through our own stupidity, etc.

As much as I personally like Obama I keep thinking that his unbashed liberal tendencies and the tendencies of his uberstrident supports to don't embody these ideas. I think they are making a bed that they don't want to lie in.

Which could very well mean another 4 years of conspiracy theories of why the election was 'stolen'

PS - Increase Mather, it is a good year for the Democrats because while they might lose the White House they have an excellent chance of taking complete control of Congress.

Now that I think about it, in this respect Obama is to the Democrats what Reagan was the Republicans. Reaganism was definitely a modernist, self-empowerment movement which presaged the very weakening of the government that Reagan tried hard to fight. What attracted me to that movement, at that time, were many of the same things that seem to be attracting people in today's liberal movement: an active fight against tyranny (today's movement sees us the tyrant however), denigration of traditional institutions (distrust of government in both cases), personal empowerment (economic in the case of Reaganism, political in the case of the modern movement), global solidarity and so on.

In the end I actually wonder if the national leaders in today's world, especially with large and complex countries such as ours, can actually affect much in the way of real change from a policy point of view. Does any president (including Bush) have much influence on the really big twists and turns of modern society? Can any Democrat really strengthen a government which is itself weakening while appearing to strengthen? Can any Republican project strength in a world where the very concept of "strength" is in flux?

Of course, I could just be seeing today's movement through the glasses of that which I was weaned on. Then again, perhaps not.

The Democratic party has gotten itself into a pickle. It has two candidates who are really very similar. Both are from the Senate - traditionally a weak launching platform for a President, far inferior to a career as a state governor - and have very slim records of actual political accomplishments there. In compensation, both have been padding their resumes shamefully. On domestic issues, both are pure Populists. Vote for Hillary and she promises a free pony (figuratively speaking) for every American. The Obama camp has recently upstaged her a bit - his idea seems to be that if we vote for him, everybody on the entire planet gets a free pony. I admire the grandiosity of the concept, as well as its futility. He can't deliver, and if he could, it wouldn't have the marvelous effect he claims. The two candidates are singing the same political tunes with trivially different lyrics. On foreign affairs, Obama is in la-la land. Hillary isn't actually in the same place, but is saddled with the necessity of pretending to be the Anti-Bush, which severely limits all her options.

Worst of the similarities is that both candidates are being flogged as historical firsts. Which way is a poor "progressive" supposed to jump? The older feminists will vote for Hillary simply because they're older feminists; and far too many Americans will vote for Obama simply because they can't imagine not supporting a brotha. That is, the sexist voters and the racist voters are already out in force. The Democratic primary is shaping up to be a slow-motion collision of two immovable objects. Now the party has a mechanism to take care of things like this - the superdelegate system. This was instituted specifically to enable the party poobahs to override the instincts of the masses, and so dodge electoral disasters such as the McGovern candidacy. As things stand now, the superdelegates can make either one the candidate. But which?

They could throw it to Obama. But I'm afraid that Obama is simply unelectable in the general by virtue of his babe-in-the-woods approach to foreign affairs, his bizarre notions of economics, the decay of his Mr Clean act as unpleasant sideshows like the Rezko trial progress, his hard-left voting record, and his unfortunate allegiance to the Rev Wright. The Dems will be buried in an electoral landslide of Mondale proportions.

If the Dem party poobahs think the same way, they could throw it to Hillary instead. That's a risky proposition, too. For one thing, she may well be the most hated politician in America, and it's hard to translate that into votes. For another, the subsequent campaign would be, to a large degree, all about Bill. But he's not that strong a candidate. He never won all that many votes in a national election. Perot, by far the strongest third-party candidate I can recall, almost certainly split off huge numbers of votes from Bush Sr, far more than that perennial pest Nader ever splits off from the Democrats. And Bill's second national election was against the weakest Republican candidate in living memory. Bill is just not a slam-dunk with the voters. But the worst problem is that, as we now suspect, there are more than a few pastors of black churches (a phrase I dislike, as I don't know exactly what it means) who will whip up resentment amongst their flocks about being "disenfranchised" by whitey, again. Then we may get riots. These will be accompanied by looting, as usual. The TV cameras will get great footage of members of "the community" carting off wide-screen TVs from looted stores. Americans of European and Asian extraction will see that, and if they blame the Democrats - and their 30 year program of flogging identity politics - as responsible for it, they just might decide that they are "Tired. Of this. Shit", go to the polls, and blow the Democrats out of every office up for re-election. The fact that those "disenfranchised" won't show up to vote for that whitey ho' will compound the problem. This all would result in a Dem electoral disaster exceeding that of an Obama candidacy.

Or the Dems could settle on a "compromise" candidate - Gore's name has been tossed around. This would enrage chunks of both voting blocks - the aging feminists and the "persons of color" - and so might just be the ideal compromise - that is, the worst of both worlds. Gore is not a strong candidate, for many reasons - he's the cheerleader for what I believe to be the fraud of the century (though that's not much of an accomplishment, since the century is still young); he will revive memories of one of the most shameful misadventures of the Democratic party, the 2000 Florida excitement, marked by a scurrilous attempt to dick with election laws in the middle of an election; and because his family is rich from Big Oil, which would make it hard for the Dems to flog one of their favorite themes during the remainder of the campaign.

The Reagan of 2012? I'd speculate: Bobby Jindal. He has a good chance to rise to that level in 2012 or 2016 provided he does a good job as governor of Louisiana. And he has started off well.

I do not predict how the voters will react, I do not know enough. They may put either Obama or Hillary in office (and will suffer buyer's remorse for four years). Personally I think Obama will be the nominee, because the Dems will want their old whine in a shiny and attractive new bottle. But that is just a guess.

Like others here I think an Obama Administration will be the Second Coming of the Carter fiasco. What passes for ideas with both Obama and Hillary have been tried and found to be wretched disasters over the past fifty or so years. The Dems are truly reactionaries.

I don't predict much anymore. "Jimmy Who?" seemed like a toothy southern peanut farmer with no base, no organization and no money. When Reagan ran everyone thought no way; he is an aging movie star with no substance just "Hope" and "vision" - a shiny road. After the New Hampshire "bimbo eruptions" I thought Clinton could not ever get the nomination! George W. Bush did not know the name of a single head of state when he ran - i.e. less than my students know - so how could he win against a policy wonk?

I am now doing "political history" - it's a lot easier to get THAT rigjht!
Steffen schmidt
Prof of Politics

31/03 07:05:13

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